ØTHERLANDS in World Wide Video Festival Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 1998.

A Description of [Weather on] the Equator and Some [Neverending Stories from] ØtherLands.
A seminar given at the World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam, 17.09.1998

My first connection to this 'node' here was an email from Walter van der Cruijsen, one of today's organizers, all of whom I'd like to thank on behalf of the group, Florian Wenz, Udo Noll and Felix Huber, for this chance to participate, and to present "A Description of the Equator and Some ØtherLands," which is running in a non-navigable mode on the screen. Walter described the frame for this afternoon in his mail, and I quote:
day2 - on game and play within the narrative structures of video. Nonlinear storytelling is very much part of the history of video art. How has this history developed and what are the influences of computergames, television and internet?

The first thought that came to my mind was George Lucas. He has said that game and play within the narrative structure of film can't work, because the psychologies of gaming and narrative are too different. A narrative structure, in his view, requires passive viewing, the audience surrendering its fate to an author's plot. Gaming is the opposite. It requires active participation. Those who partake steer their fates in concert with fortune and others who play the game. Interactive cinema, the fusion of narrative and gaming, Lucas said, is like trying to read a book and play ball with your kid at the same time. It can't work. Lucas' contention may have been tongue-in-cheek on his part, but it reveals our general commitment to a star-shaped system for distributing culture, not only cinema, but also the books and art that we consume. The maps of such star systems look like this: one brilliant author moves to the center or is placed there by the rest of us gathering around for mass consumption. A promise of transcendence is the attractor. This can be a desire for personal insight or for public fame. Some, the ambitious ones, try to get as close to the center as possible. Others, the loners, look on from a distance, and one day may become attractors themselves. The star-shaped system produces all sorts of cultural icons - movie stars, art stars, and so on.

It's the shepard-and-flock paradigm. Movie-going, especially in America where ads are banned before the spectacle begins, reminds me of church-going. Both rely on the production of aura to be affective. Movie theaters, churches, temples, and I might as well add some governmental buildings and museums as well, use this attribute of the star-shaped system, the potential for aura which, when it works, envelops visitors in an atmosphere of sanctity. We worship it. Any contents in the space which get coated with aura share a unity and we say the movie holds up, or the show holds together.

Now step back for a moment and picture a galaxy of all these stars. Substitute object-with-aura for star and we arrive at the galactic strategies of installation art and meg-ashows like a documenta. We get lost, we remain star-struck, when we don't involve ourselves and build connections, tracing lines between objects-with-aura to generate our own meaning. In these physical manifestations of what is going on in Net.Art, aesthetic meaning is not only received from a single object in our midst. It's derived between objects and their receiver(s.) Call it participatory aesthetics. Of course. if the majority of objects lack aura, we remain in the dark.

Still, the permutations of connecting stars in a galaxy remain mindboggling. The numbers are endless, if we approach this task as consumers and not players. Out of a cloud of stars, an entire zoology of forms may appear and disappear not only to us but in us and with us when we take part in the construction of aesthetic meanings. Otherwise we fall victim to a pathology of hyperconsumption. Overload sets in. We get nervous and simply withdraw.

Drawing lines between the stars in search of meaningful configurations is what early astrologers did. [It's what the polymath Alexander von Humboldt did in his "Cosmos" and I mention him here as he the eccentric focus for our next hypermedia project that hopefully will become a reality next year if we get the funding to develop a new 'narrative engine.'] Astrology was an early metaphor for cyberspace, which is spinning off hyperculture, global culture, and a dark hyperconfusion among adherents to the shepard-and-flock paradigm for cultural production. Astrology mapped the stars.

Astronomical number of configurations were reduced to a consumable level. Although astrologers may have intended this for our active participation, most of us consume a birthright to fate halfheartedly from the back pages of the daily press. Astrology didn't stop at mythologizing single planets and stars. It worshipped connectivity. It looked at the bigger picture, the meta-content of star formations. Alchemists and some Natural Philosophers have added to their zoomorphic picture book. And it hasn't stopped yet. In virtual communities not only are new creatures appearing. Each represents a player. Mythology is getting more personal. Star patterns are falling from the sky on-line.

But they remain on the screen at the movies and on a raised platform in a church or mosque, where 'worshipers' flock to their seats in obedience, with the promise of transcendence. Once seated the flock remains still and silent throughout the spectacle's unfolding. Body movement is reduced to shuffling feet or shifting a bit of weight.
At the movies, it's as though our heads were clamped in a brace and our gaze remotely controlled. It may be a relishing thought. Zoom out, says the author, and all eyes in the theater back up. Look away from the action, and we do, without moving a muscle. Fade to black and all eyes close while they stay open. It is only through this consensual submission to an author's visual and i might add aural authority, that the narrative may achieve enough authority to take hold of the flock, produce aura, and fulfill its promise of transcendence.

These are some rules set forth in an author's game of linear narrative, a game that invariably begins where most games are supposed to end- with a giving-up. Let go, get passive, and if aura is produced, you may see stars, and identify with a dream. But 'to identify' doesn't mean 'to be identical.' It's still somebody else's dream.
I remember Dorothy's look of dismay when the curtain opened on her dream in the Emerald City and she saw the Wizard pulling her strings. She had hoped to participate in the dream actively and not merely subject herself to his. I mean, how else would she ever weather her way back home?

Author cinema and video art have often empathized with Dorothy, at times interrupting our passive viewing by revealing their wizardry in provocative ways, making audiences aware that they are in at least two spaces at once. Narrative spaces we virtually move through both in front of and behind their cameras, or even in them. In installation situations add the space we really move through with other 'players.'

The spread between engagement in a narrative and the game of encountering another is reduced on the Internet by the absence of any commanding center and, therefore, the dissolution of the shepard-and-flock paradigm into a consensual free-for-all. Okay, I know, it's because nobody, no body, is really there. On-line we are not present, we re-present ourselves. This is how the stars fall from the sky and how, through a web of words and images, we may pick some up, different ones at different moments and reconfigure ourself as some creature we may never have glimpsed in a zoo or the zodiac.

And yes it's all 100% fake. The adult skepticism we inherit for participating in anything fake, has the consolation on-line of allowing us to know people and things we wouldn't in RL (Real Life.) Not even briefly. Identity is a construct of preferences on-line. As projection it is somehow protection, opening whatever creature we present to encounters.

This is hardly possible in the hard space of museums and movie theaters. You can see everybody. Participation there, and I mean a verbal exchange with someone, not a phenomenological experience in the presence of others, is embarrassing most of the time. It always seems forced, or artificially induced, because you're really there! Don't scapegoat filmmakers or video artists for falling short in attempts to get participatory, blame the star-shaped system of distribution to which they are at least technically and architecturally bound.

In fact it was video artists and theorists who were first to my knowledge to point to a desire, however unfulfilled in their day, for a participatory aesthetic in art and media. For instance, community television programming was, for example, their idea early on. That turned into cable TV and now we have Ted Turner. Another star is born.

Another crude instance for a future participatory form of video, one now adapted on the Net in a much less spectacular fashion, was amusingly formulated by the very perspicacious Nam June Paik in a letter to Billy Kluever dated 1965, and I quote:
"Someday a more elaborate scanning system ... will enable us to sense much more information at single carrier band, f.i. audio, video, pulse, temperature, moisture, pressure of your body combined. If combined with robot made of rubber, form expandable-shrinkable cathode ray tube, and if it is 'une petite robotine' ... please tele-fuck!"

The same year that brought us TCP IP, which brought us the Internet as we know it, back in 1977, an early video art anthologist and capricious art critic, Gregory Battcock, proscribed the impact of the Internet upon aesthetics almost to a 'T.' And I quote him now from his fantastic and little-known essay "The Aesthetics of Boeing:"
"Ultimately, when the environment becomes totally portable, we shall find that transportation will no longer involve movement. It will serve as concept. A major result of all this, and there have been numerous indications that the result is already upon us, is the final diminishing of those critical faculties outlined by the connoisseurs--those principles of art appreciation. There will be a shift in aesthetics from attention to the art object to attention to the receiver."

This shift in aesthetics takes place on "The Equator." We travel to the equator in Kenya, Uganda and on the Java Sea but that is not "The Equator" we describe in what turns out to be a group autobiographical web of movies. Call it a 'hypermovie.' When we perform along the earth's equator, we are actually linking ourselves back to "Arctic Circle" an earlier 'double travel' or travel-as-art project we made along the roadways in the remote wilderness of the Canadian North while traveling the networks on the crowded global Infobahn.

What we mean by our "Equator" is a correspondence. It is the shifting and provisional correspondence that happens between the core authors, other authors, in a sort of loose affiliation with each other and our audience of users. Actually the line of distinction between roles gets blurred in this equation and that's the real story. What you see on the screen are traces of that.

There is nowhere you can be that is both north and south at the same time. The earth's equator is a no man's land, narrower than any space between counties. Our "Equator" is equally virtual. Like the big circle or any circle, our "Equator" has no beginning and no end. It's a neverending story. That's the quandary I have up here. How do I describe our tangled "Equator" without your participation? It's only possible through metaphor. The first one I thought of was pretty stupid, but this is actually email, here goes.

It was late and my stomach was grumbling as I pondered how to untangle our hypernarrative artwork into a narrative context like this. I saw myself sitting at a dinner table staring at a dish of spaghetti all tangled up, trying to figure out how to slurp up a few strands of it from this big bowl of bolognese. You know you can't, or at least I can't, without getting at least a splash of sauce on my chin.

Then it dawned on me. The best way to begin to untangle for you what we have spent a year or more weaving would be to turn to another author and especially agent40 for help. I'll read now the body of one email he sent me:
06. Aug., night, Singapore.
Back at the Source of the poles, and the man of untutored ideality who happens to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I think so. He can't be worse than before definitely. There is a necessary condition for every cognition that (is given us by the evangelist) rides on his pallid horse. (Tuesday) PURSUED. Finding in the powers of cognition - that is, if that man's serious. You Offended? Sorry, i go off-line, please tell me your tired eyes, accompanied by his friend and mechanic Rolf Wütherich, who survived the accident driving. I decide to go to bed now. ... go for a moment till zoological hallucinations set in. I stepped back and wondered what Øther species could be sleeping or stalking below the treetops that carpeted our view. Perhaps for once a blue Volvo. Uneasy faces. A voluminous package on the roof. It wasn't going anywhere. the driver couldn't even get its tires spinning.

Agent40 has a way of untangling the strands of hypertext stored on our "Equator." As narrative it only gets more tangled up in itself, tripping, perhaps delightfully, on words, as they unravel into plaintext. Agent40 knows only too well that transcribing hypertext-to-plaintext is fraught, absurd, akin to using Ariadne's Thread as a fishing line instead of using it as intended, to navigate one's way through an endless maze of text. Caught any kingfish, agent40?

Agent40 is playing a game of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey with me in this mail. The rules are different though than the standard B-line to the ass's ass expected of the blindfolded player. Agent40's Donkey rules are more like Burroughs' rules for the Cut-Up: It's not how close the tail gets to that red eye back there, it's not about the usual anatomy of narrative, it's what the damned creature looks like in the end, with a tail on a hoof and another out in left field. Agent40's 'tale' might miss its mark and still hit. Don't get me wrong, there's no more luck here than in any game, except chess maybe. Agent40's narrative is no accident. The source - mainly the script, chat and email from "The Equator" - and its destination - our memories - are actively involved.

Who is agent40? She, he, or it goes by other aliases, '/me' or 'Mr.King,' all of whom you may meet in "The Equator" chatroom or get mail from if you like. Agent40 relates closely to key attributes attached to one core author on "The Equator" - a cyberpunk with an Internet server called 'king,' whose nickname in chat is sometimes /me, and whose alias in "ØtherLands" is agent04, an anagram for agent40. Case closed! Agent04, who I call Udo in RL (Real Life,) is apparently agent40. But he's not. Agent40 is none of the authors on "The Equator," and all of us as well!

Agent04 sampled and hacked the code that drives agent40's 'narrative engine.' Yes, it's an it, the system talking, a chatbot as Gesamtautor. To ensure a modicum of literacy agent40's vernacular is salted sometimes with other literature, real literature, early on with segments from Melville's "Moby Dick." To assure a respectable quotient of absurdity, agent40's tongue has been doped at times with doses of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." Actually, agent40 will eat any word put on its plate, in any language, as long as it's plain ascii. Agent40 will eat your words.

Agent40 plays weatherman or weathergirl on "The Equator." It reports on travel conditions, stormy relationships, whatever authors do, and that includes our users in "ØtherLands." If the general climate is poetic, then agent40 waxes poetry. If the map changes to Africa then agent40 will report the weather from there, as it happens. When conversation gets hot a lot, Agent40's temperature rises. But you'll have to get active, read between the lines, to know what the weather's doing in "ØtherLands."
"The Equator" is a mesh of broken stories. That's a lot like everyday life. And it's a fundamental principle in hypernarrative media. Our lives, as we make our way through and get to know them in memory, are about how we inhabit and connect the spaces, the intervals between so many broken stories and fragments of experience. Hypernarrative media too happens in the spaces inbetween broken narratives. The difference between our idea of life and hypernarrative being, that the former we inhabit, and the latter inhabits us.

Misconnections, distractions and interruptions are an unavoidable part of life. They are an integral part of our hypernarrative "Equator." Cinema too, it has been said, exists in the cut. Just reduce a movie to its essence: black screen, white screen, to imagine this. However in a straight narrative like a movie, sequences are set by an author. In a 'hypermovie' like "ØtherLands” a set of sequences is negotiated by content, and that content is both author and audience. It's experimental. Access is open to an author's cauldron. Everyone can add their own ingredients. It's like placing a big container on a public square. It's contents commingle. The author's contents may get buried by the users'.

Broken stories often means shattered egos. Everyone melts into a hypernarrative. There are no islands on our "Equator." Every story you see on the screen is broken, but every author is linked. Egos are present but balanced, not equal but equivocative. An author may be identified somewhere in some "ØtherLand" but overall no one has a fixed identity. Our "Equator" maps the correspondence between identities within an individual and amongst them, in their mutual midst.

For example, if an author, or a user, starts a storyline, holds it, and no fishes bite, it's fate is a dead end, seldom to be traveled. It's a better strategy then to jump into somebody else's pond. You have a better chance of surviving in "ØtherLands" that way, if you don't want to be talking only to yourself.

On this level "The Equator" is about role playing, group dynamics and a readiness for artistic collaboration. If it is any consolation for the fear that, facing a liquid Self, a demon, poses that intransigent part of ourself we call ego, then hypertext and liquid Selves, two principles at work in "ØtherLands," are entwined with the roots of language as they grew.

Stories have always been woven. Text means literally 'a weaving of words' a fabric, a texture, a textile, text on a page. It was only a predictable jump that the prefix hyper-, meaning 'over' or 'above' would some day be added to the word-stem 'text.' Hypertext is not radically different from text. It renders it transparent and makes reading between the lines a bit easier. It lends a depth at times, adds speed to some thoughts, and can slow us down in its labyrinth.

On page 346 of my Pocket Webster dictionary - about the only book I know that doesn't need page numbers - I found a few words listed with the prefix 'hyper-.' Hypertext wasn't there. I noticed, however, that all of the words that were, shared a certain sick quality. Hyperacid (my stomach!), hyperactive (my childhood!), hypercritical (sorry!), hypersensitive (sorry again!!), hypertrophy (yee gad!), hypervitaminosis (what is that!) - all biological or psychological pathologies. Is it any surprise then that the word hypertext (coined by Ted Nelson in 1965,) hypermedia (coined for the Aspen Movie Map videodisc in 1978), and more recent words like hypercinema, hypernarrative, hyperreality, hyperspace and hypervideo would be viewed by that rational part in us as being, if not pathological, a neurotic condition of culture?

Actually a lot of Internet-related vernacular is drug-related. Cyberspace was defined by its identifier Gibson as being 'a consensual hallucination.' We're on-line, like we're on TV or on the phone, both valid forms of perceptual hallucination. I mean is that person on the TV or in it? And where are we when we speak on the telephone? If you're on-line or on drugs, you're a 'user.' If you're on a lot, you're 'addicted.' Webstock is replacing Woodstock, and potheads are becoming netheads. I mean what is going on!

It has something to do with our pigeonholing hallucination as a pathology and mainly drug-induced when it is not. It also has something to do with the Internet's root being in youth culture and stemming from its historical 'youthful' precedents as far back as 'Beat' culture, when artists worked together in a text-based way, formed loose affiliations as long as the network of highways could get them together.

I think the link between Net culture and Beat culture is very close on a number of levels. This doesn't take me back to where I want to go before ending. But that I guess is a quality I've picked up from hypertext. Anyway, the Beats worked a lot with words. They also worked together at times, and showed up in each other's work. They were lotech hackers, trying to crack what they called the 'military industrial complex' that they felt was impinging on their personal right of expression. They exhibited and read their works preferably in nontraditional spaces. And the word chosen by the druggie Herbert E. Huncke whose name for the movement 'Beat' stuck has a confused but interesting etymology. Beat means downtrodden, driven underground. It has a punky connotation as in 'beat up.' It shares a vibe with the music of the times, cool jazz. It has a zen quality and also, according to Jack Kerouac, an angelic one as in the word 'beatitude.' All these qualities can be found at the roots of Net culture.

In my attempt to sign off here, let me pick up on the 'angelic' quality thread. Paul Virilio speaks for youth culture both then and now when he said in interview: "Our desire [is] to be angels, not to die, but to be dead, and be omnipresent and out of time." Welcome to "ØtherLands".

Finally, if Jean Luc Godard can can say that film is "life at 24 frames a second." and if Les Levine can say television and video are "time moving through space." then let 'me/we' say that hypermedia is "tracing lives at the speed of light as they move across intervals between time and space." Okay, I'll keep working on that. Thank You.

Copyright 1998 Philip Pocock

ØTHERLANDS Installation Index